Jury awards $2.25 million to Riverside County sergeant forced to resign after reporting harassment
Riverside County has been ordered to pay $2.25 million to a former sergeant who said he was pressured into early retirement in retaliation for reporting workplace harassment by a supervisor.
Sergeant. According to the complaint, Frank Lodes was forced to leave the job he loved by writing a resignation letter in the Del Taco parking lot in 2022 while a senior department official threatened him with increased investigations. A civil jury on Tuesday concluded that Lodes resigned involuntarily because of her reporting on a hostile workplace and was awarded a multimillion-dollar payment for emotional damages.
Lodes’ lawyer, Bijan Darvish, said the award was a “significant figure” that adequately represented the damage done to Lodes, noting that the time since his forced retirement had been the “four darkest years” of Lodes’ life.
He said his client did not want to comment on the verdict because the events remained painful to discuss. The Sheriff’s Department and the county did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
“Being a police officer was his life; he lived and breathed it 24/7,” Darvish said. “That was his whole identity, and that’s why it was so hard for him when it was taken away.”
The grand jury award comes amid a rare open gubernatorial race that includes Sheriff Department chief Chad Bianco, a leading GOP candidate. Bianco has tied his campaign to his long career in law enforcement spanning more than three decades, including serving as the elected sheriff of Riverside County since 2019.
Although high-ranking Sheriff’s Department officials were involved in Lodes’ case, Darvish said no evidence was presented at trial that Bianco had direct knowledge of his client’s mistreatment. Bianco was not a defendant in the case. His campaign did not respond to a request for comment.
Darvish argues that the case points to the department’s culture of covering up allegations of misconduct.
“When there’s a harassment complaint against the captain and they never investigate and pressure someone to resign and withdraw the complaint, then that’s a systemic problem,” he said.
The retaliation began after Lodes, a 25-year veteran of the department, formally reported workplace harassment to human resources in March 2022, according to the complaint.
Lodes was called mentally ill in front of his peers by a captain at a promotion meeting around October 2021. A few months later, he found derogatory posters of his head on a child’s body tucked into uniform pockets and gun holsters and taped to station walls, according to the complaint.
According to Darvish, the department responded to her report of harassment by illegally launching an investigation into Lodes using informants and threatening her with possible criminal prosecution.
The jury agreed that these allegations were a pretext to cover up unlawful retaliation.
A few days after she filed a workplace harassment complaint, an Internal Affairs sergeant put Lodes’ personal belongings in a box and took them to her home, according to the complaint. The sergeant pressured Lodes, then 47, for hours to accept early retirement.
The next day, Lodes was told to meet with a senior official from the Sheriff’s Department in the Del Taco parking lot, who instructed him to resign immediately and withdraw his harassment complaint.
The $2.25 million award in the civil case will come out of the county’s coffers.
The award prompted renewed scrutiny of the Bianco Sheriff’s Department two weeks before primary election ballots hit Californians’ mailboxes.
It also came into the spotlight in March after seizing more than 650,000 ballots from the November election as part of an investigation to determine whether they were counted fraudulently. The California Supreme Court suspended the investigation shortly before halting it for further review.
Times writer James Queally contributed to this report.
